


slow dancing in a burning room

by flwrpotts



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, the one in which im really not over the implications of the serpent dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 19:44:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14027409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/pseuds/flwrpotts
Summary: She turned back towards F.P.“Don’t watch,” she told him. She meant for it to come across bitchy, authoritative, but her voice cracked at the end, revealing the thin sliver of desperation. She couldn’t stand for him to watch her do it.He looked at her for a moment before nodding once, and the relief unfolded sharply in her chest. F.P picked up the abandoned handle of Everclear and tipped it back. Alice watched the bob of his Adam’s apple as he knocked back the last of it.ORthree takes on the serpent dance.





	slow dancing in a burning room

**Author's Note:**

> anyways literally no one asked for this but! here it is anyways! title comes from "slow dancing in a burning room" by John Mayer.

 

no one will answer your prayers/

until you take off that dress/

no one will hear all your crying/

until you take your last breath

\- learning, perfume genius 

* * *

 

i. alice

The Whyte Wyrm had a dressing room in it.

Really, it was little more than a storage closet- an 8x8 dusty box with one mirrored wall and an odd collection of old lipsticks- but still. Alice would have found it ironic, were it not for the way her pulse was racing. She had known she would do the dance since the day she started sixth grade and her oldest sister sat her down to explain the way the world worked. And yet, the reality of it still shocked her, the world tinged with the sick, surreal feeling of a nightmare.

She didn’t have the spare cash for fancy underwear, so she had borrowed a push-up bra from Annie, the same one she wore when she did the dance three years prior. _Sisterhood of the Travelling Victoria’s Secret_ she had called it, and Alice had smiled wryly as she accepted the scrap of black lace. It didn’t quite fit her right, and angry red marks were currently rising on her skin.

She turned to examine her body in the ancient, dark spotted mirror, taking in the way the uneven light threw dark shadows across her silhouette. She was fifteen and still a little gawky, awkward in her own skin. The thought of taking off her clothes in a crowd of people was terror like she had never really known it.

 _Get it together_ , she told herself sternly, sucking in a breath and straightening her spine, pulling back her shoulders hard enough to ache.

Logically, she knew that there was nothing truly to fear. Both her older sisters had done the dance. She would do the dance, too. And yet, the panic was a slippery, vicious thing that had snuck under her ribs, sending her pulse skittering. _God, if anyone from school ever found out-_

She began to count down from one hundred, trying to wrangle the hurricane of fear brewing in her brain, but the door opened before she could get to eighty-nine. Alice schooled her features into an icy neutrality before turning around.

She was expecting Byrdie, or maybe one of the older Serpents there to tell her the time had come. Instead, F.P Jones the II stood in the doorway, looking uncertain in a way Alice had never seen him before, almost nervous. She bristled.

“Come to see the bloodbath?” she asked sharply, refusing to be embarrassed by the fact that she was still only in her underwear.

“Nothing I haven’t seen before, sweetheart,” F.P replied dryly. Alice didn’t smile, but it was a near thing. The tension in the room eased.

He moved all the way into the tiny space, maneuvering the door shut behind him. “Shot of liquid courage?” he asked, revealing the bottle of shitty Everclear he had pressed behind his back.

“I knew there was a reason we kept you around,” she snarked. F.P grinned at her and cracked open the bottle, taking too long a swig without flinching. He handed it over to her, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Alice tipped back the bottle, taking great pains not to wince at the burn of the off-brand liquor.

The warmth settled deep into her chest, and she relaxed into the sensation, letting it steady her raw nerves. F.P watched her, in that eerie, unsettling way he always had, like he could see straight inside her brain, easily unspool her tangled thoughts.

She leaned back against the mirror as she took another long sip, letting her eyes fall shut. Music throbbed faintly into the room, some old Johnny Cash ballad. She preferred not to peel back the layers of irony.

She passed the bottle back to F.P, who took another easy swig. Alice picked up her denim shorts from where they were folded in a neat pile and began to wriggle into them. F.P glanced at her, silently asking a question.

“Not a strip dance if you don’t strip,” she replied in answer, bitter enough that she could taste the words in her mouth. She pulled on her top a moment later, an old Stevie Nicks t-shirt with holes in the collar. It had been Annie’s shirt for years, and Alice found a strange comfort in the lingering smell of her eldest sister, cigarette smoke and heavy floral trapped in cotton. She resisted the urge to press the material into her face.

F.P’s expression did something complicated, nearly soft, but before he could say anything there was a knock at the door. Alice’s stomach lurched, and all the alcohol in the world couldn’t stifle the way she felt suddenly and terribly fifteen. She opened the door to reveal Gasoline on the other side.

“Ready?” he asked, almost paternal. Alice nodded sharply, head held high and gaze entirely expressionless. It was a well-practiced facade, and Gasoline’s mouth went a little soft with sympathy, or maybe pity. “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, and shut the door behind him.

She turned back towards F.P.

“Don’t watch,” she told him. She meant for it to come across bitchy, authoritative, but her voice cracked at the end, revealing the thin sliver of desperation. She couldn’t stand for him to watch her do it.

He looked at her for a moment before nodding once, and the relief unfolded sharply in her chest. F.P picked up the abandoned handle of Everclear and tipped it back. Alice watched the bob of his Adam’s apple as he knocked back the last of it.

There was another banging at the door, followed by a different voice. Some new member who already thought he ran the game- Tall Boy, or something. “Alice! If you want in, you have to do it now.”

“That’s my cue,” she said archly. “Wish me luck?”

“You look good, Ally, F.P said, squeezing her hip and disappearing out the door before she could reprimand him for the preschool nickname.

Alice took and deep breath and assessed her reflection one more time before walking out the door. The Everclear had blunted her panic slightly, but adrenaline still pulsed in time with her heartbeat, a sick feedback loop of fight or flight.

She was immediately hit with the sticky, alcoholic heat of the packed room, the way that tension ran through the crowd like a snapped back rubber band.

Her high heels wobbled as she stepped onto the stage with the opening swells of music, that song by _The Police_ that Fred was always imitating. There was the usual amount of jeering and hollering, gaggles of middle-aged men taking drags off their cigarettes and looking her up and down. She felt the hot stage lights began to melt the makeup she had applied, too thick and in the slightly wrong shade.

“Nice ass!” someone called, and there was a sweep of raucous laughter that drowned out the sound of the music.

 _Fuck this_ Alice thought with a sudden, vicious start. Anger displaced the fear, like a weight dropped in a bucket of water, and she tugged her hair out if its ponytail in one quick yank, letting the dark waves settle across her shoulders.

She wasn’t scared anymore. She wanted blood. She wanted to make every damn person in the room feel like she did, sick and sad and scared.

There was an unnatural steadiness to her movements as she peeled off her shirt, spinning once around the grimy metal pole. She couldn’t help but think, rather distantly, that somewhere across town Hal Cooper was sitting down to dinner with his gleaming, wholesome, all-American family.

She slid down the metal rod in an artificial attempt at sexiness, eliciting a round of catcalls.  The anger thrummed through her, loud in her ears like sex, or a gunshot, and she unbuttoned her shorts with the same graceless energy. _Fuck this._

The next thirty seconds passed in a hot, dizzying flash, somehow lasting forever and no time at all. Somehow, she found herself walking off the stage to raucous applause, stopping only to pluck her shorts up off the ground.

Alice dutifully accepted and tipped back the rounds of shots the senior members of the gang had bought her, accepting compliments and arranging logistics to get her jacket, still seething. She spied F.P Jones the First in the corner, and resisted the urge to snarl when he cast her a smug, appreciative look.

It was ten minutes before she could escape the crowd, and she swept her hair into a quick, aggressive ponytail as she walked outside. Her previous anger had given away to a sort of brittleness, like the ashes of a burned down building, and she pulled the leather jack tighter around her shoulders. The night air was bracingly cold, but Alice welcome the chill, her breath high and shallow in her diaphragm, not quite able to fill her lungs.

F.P was was smoking a cigarette and holding court with a pack of his boys out front, gestures grand and inebriated. But he spotted Alice as she strode out the building, rounding the corner decisively, and jogged over to follow her.

Alice had hardly rounded the corner, out of eyeshot,  before she doubled over, throwing up the remains of the Everclear into a bush. The alcohol burned at the back of her throat, but she straightened up after a moment, dragging a hand across the back of her mouth.

“Not a word,” she warned F.P, voice ragged. Her chest moved quickly, like she had just run a marathon, and she stared at the side of the building, studiously avoiding contact.

He said nothing, just passed her his cigarette. Alice leaned against the side of the building, taking a long drag. Exhaustion was a lead weight, and she let her eyes fall shut.

F.P lit himself another Lucky Strike with his dad’s shitty old silver Zippo, as if faint, delicate bruising didn’t still ring his eye from where F.P Jones the First had drunkenly swung at him a week ago. Alice couldn’t decide whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

“I hate this fucking town,” she confessed into the darkness, voice raw and all too honest.

F.P laughed once to himself, a sharp, mangled thing. “Me too,” he replied. “Let’s go get fucked up.”  
Alice threw away the smoldering end of her cigarette and followed him back inside.

* * *

 

ii. penny

Penny didn’t bother to wait for the music to start before she stepped out onto the stage. No one was looking at her, yet, so she took a moment to straighten out her bangs, choppy and done herself over the bathroom sink. Slowly, the opening strains of music started to play, something campy and dumb and undoubtedly chosen by Tall Boy. She could work with campy and dumb.

She cleared her throat into the microphone and the din of the bar started to quiet, heads turning to her expectantly. Penny cracked her abrasive watermelon gum, pulling out a string of it out to wrap around her finger. Under the neon light, her skin was hot pink and alien. It was a babyish, ridiculous sort of sexiness, but it produced the desired results.

“Take it off, baby!” someone hollered, and Penny grinned as she obliged, slowly unbuttoning her top. She let the silky material float to the ground, and it immediately went translucent in a sticky puddle of spilled beer. Penny paid no attention to the ruined item. She had more important things to focus on.

Her underwear was candy pink and her bra was stuffed with tissue paper from the bathroom, not that any of the patrons were smart enough to realize it. Now everyone was looking at her. Penny smiled slowly, sweetly and blew a kiss to some random fifty-something in the crowd.

She spun once and men’s eyes dragged on her body, lit up with a dumb, carnal desire. The power of it thrilled her, lighting her up like an electric current. They all thought they were winning. _You fucking idiots,_ she thought with a shred of glee. _You have no fucking clue what’s happening. You have no idea what I am._

It was nearly too easy, the raw, uncharted power. It was dominance without having to lift a single finger. It was better than any drug she had ever tried. More addictive, too.

Penny teased a strand of hair around her finger, coy. All the eyes on her shone with hunger, but she didn’t give them what they wanted.

What they really wanted, of course, was to chew her up and spit her out. To them, she was nothing more than a smile and good set of tits, something to be used.

Sure, they wanted her to take off her clothes. But what they really wanted, deep down, was to suck the life out of her and then throw out what remained. The dance completed the whole cycle in one easy step. They wanted her to be sexy, and then to be forgotten.

There wasn’t a shot in hell Penny was going to let that happen. But she did unbutton her skirt, letting it fall next to her ruined shirt. Wolf whistles and catcalls filled the room, and Penny winked, shimmying over to the pole.

She spun once around the metal, warming up to it. _Look like the bimbo, but be the serpent underneath, or whatever._ She teased the audience, waiting for the crowd of lust to boil up into a near frenzy before she really began.

The song was already winding down, sliding into the whiny, autotuned bridge, but Penny flexed around the pole, contorting her limbs in a way that was nearly grotesque. There wasn’t much technique to it, though you wouldn’t believe it the way all the new female recruits bitched about having to do it.

She blew another kiss, to some nameless, wasted Serpent, and realized with a start that she could pull out a gun and shoot someone in the head and they would still want her to keep dancing. The knowledge was heady, powerful enough that she could taste it in her mouth, like blood.

The song ended with a whimper rather than a bang, but Penny was undaunted. The speakers fell quiet, and the room was silent, still crackling with electricity. There was no cheering, no one pushing to come bring her a jacket. They were waiting on her for the next move. The moment brimmed with anticipation.

Technically, she had done what she set out to do. There wasn’t a person in the room who wasn’t looking at her, that wasn’t transfixed, at least momentarily. She could walk off the stage, accept the off-brand vodka shots on the house, put on the leather jacket and feel accomplished.

But the trick to power, she had learned, wasn’t getting it, but keeping it. You got dumb, you got sloppy, and you lost what you had.

And, well, being sixteen meant that she was a little older than most of the girls that did the dance. Lacy underwear. Blonde hair. Pretty enough, but ultimately forgettable. Pretty enough girls looking to do the dance were a dime a dozen on the Southside, after all. Whatever she had now, it would be forgotten about the next time some half-drunk fifteen year old stepped onto stage. Penny Peabody didn’t _do_ forgettable.

And so she unhooked her bra, letting the flimsy thing drop to the ground. She didn’t bother to be subtle about it, shifting her hair off of her shoulders for a better view. For a split second she remained perfectly still, like she was posing for a portrait. The room was wired with tension, wired to her.

And then she grinned bashfully- _Oops! Silly me!_ She let blood rise to her cheeks, bending at the waist to pluck the bra up from the ground, and the momentary spell broke. Men started cheering, hollering, positively losing their shit as she hooked the damn thing back on.

Penny smiled once more, apologetic, before collecting her clothes off the floor. She stepped off the stage, human again, and people parted around her, equal parts attracted and repulsed. Static electricity made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. And finally, Gasoline approached her, holding the jacket in front of him like it was a sacrifice.

“That was quite the show, kid,” he said, draping the leather over her shoulders. Everyone was watching.

“Hey, thanks!” she chirped. “And really, thank you for the opportunity.”

He patted her clumsily on the back and strode off. Goosebumps rose on her legs. She scanned the crowd of admirers, mentally debating who she wanted to buy her the first shot of tequila.

 _And that, ladies and gentlemen,”_ she thought to herself, triumphant. _That is how you take over a gang._

* * *

 

iii. toni

“I won’t do it,” she tells Tall Boy, voice worn thin. “This is bullshit.”

Byrdie leaned over the bar, grinning like the cat that got the canary. “You aren’t anything special, princess” she told her, grinning snidely. “You do the dance like everyone else, or you don’t pledge. There’s an open slot tonight.”

Toni turned and walked out the door, done with the conversation. It was a clear, cold, January, and her breath puffed out white in front of her as she paced around the Wyrm. Her mind clicked through the options: to dance, or not to dance.

Her uncle had kicked her out again, telling her he wouldn’t let her back in unless she paid the electric bill, and she was still $75 short on the money. It was a cold winter, and she needed a place to sleep as soon as possible. There were only so many nights she could crash with Sweet Pea.

Toni knew she was a legacy, and that the Serpents would help her out as soon as she established that she was one of them. But the idea of doing the dance made her skin crawl, went against everything she stood for. On some stupid, irrevocable level, she believed that doing the dance would somehow make her less herself, would take away her credibility. She wanted to be a Serpent, but not like that.

And she did want to be a Serpent, badly. She had wanted to since she was six years old and her grandfather had shown her the scrapbook of photos from the first incarnation of the group. There was nobility, in that original idea. Legacy. A sense of history. If she could just get her foot in the door, she knew she could change things. Ease off the drug running, the stripping, and bring back the original values of the Serpents.

Toni took in a deep breath, and then another. Quickly, she made the decision. She pivoted around on her heel, and walked back into the door.

“I’ll take the slot tonight,” she told Tall Boy. He nodded, not unkind, and wrote her name down on the dusty chalkboard. Byrdie cackled like a hyena and continued washing glasses. Toni gave her a dirty look, but didn’t say anything.

The boys were all gathered around a bonfire of old scrap wood when she got back to Sunnyside, rubbing their hands together for warmth and elbowing one another in jest.

“I’m doing the dance tonight,” she said, no preamble, knocking into Sweet Pea to force him to make room in the circle.

“Sucks,” offered Fangs. The other boys nodded in agreement, all a little awkward.

“At least it’ll be over quick,” Joaquin said. The skin around his bicep was still tender and raw from the new tattoo, and Toni sighed. They might have run the gauntlet, but they didn’t really understand what the dance meant. What it took from you.

“Yeah,” she said, too tired to argue. “It’ll be over fast.”

Three hours later, she was back in the bar, wearing her darkest shade of lipstick and thick eyeliner, borrowed from Fangs’ older sister. She stepped onstage offbeat with the music and peeled off her white tank top, not bothering to make a show out of it. The audience yelled, and Toni managed a flat, artificial smile.

The cheers in the crowd felt like bloodsport, and she felt suddenly, vividly, like she was the subject of some fucked up anatomy lesson. Like every Serpent leering at her could peel back her skin, look at the nerves and muscles and viscera underneath. The music continued to play, some autotuned Britney Spears number, girlishly sexy and doubtlessly picked by one of the older Serpents.

She didn’t feel righteously angry, anymore. She felt like a fourteen year old in a leopard print training bra. Sweet Pea and Fangs sat at a table in the corner, both looking slightly ill as they watched. She made a concerted effort not to look at them as she peeled off her jeans with the same clinical detachment, feeling detached from her body.

She twisted around the pole in some approximation of sexiness, information subconsciously gleaned from watching past dances and reruns of MTV music videos. A few seconds, one more loop around the pole, and it was over. She had done it.

Toni’s head spun as F.P walked onto the stage, smiling with eyes full of pity.

“Thank you, Toni,” he said, and draped the jacket over her shoulders. She could hardly make out what he was saying, the voices still tinny and hollow in her ears.

She pushed her way through the crowd, brushing off congratulations as she went. Sweet Pea and Fangs followed, and she didn’t say anything as the three of them stepped outside.

They walked home together, the same way they had since they were skinny kids with scraped knees and popsicle stained mouths, picking four leaf clovers out of patches of weeds and watching drunken men come out of the bar.

The weight of what had happened kept stunning her, and her breath still hadn’t evened out, hard and scraping like she had just run a marathon. _No take backs_ she thought to herself, a little hysterical. She couldn’t go back. Her brain struggled to wrap around the concept, that she was a proper Serpent, that she couldn’t go back. It was done.

Sweet Pea and Fangs were quiet for once in their lives, the heavy silence of no one quite knowing what to say. Toni loved them for it, their fumbling kindness that no one ever taught them. But it didn’t change the way that the jacket felt light, almost insubstantial, from where it rested on her shoulders.

Her uncle’s trailer finally swung into view, shitty and rusted in the low, bleeding light. The thought of having to sneak in through the back window, having to check that her uncle was passed out on the couch, knocked her headache up another notch, pounding like someone was beating at her skull with a bat.

She wanted a shower with a never ending supply of hot water. She wanted a new city, where no one knew her name. She wanted to take the night back, to peel up the messy chain of events and do it all over again, Groundhog Day until she got it right.

“C’mon,” Sweet Pea said, breaking the silence. “Mom took the twins up to visit Uncle Jimmy for the weekend. We can hang out, or something.”

She nodded, and it was an aching relief to step inside the Zhang trailer, the background of all her childhood memories. It was the radio that always hummed in the background, the smell of cooking seeped into the walls, the familiar, warm clutter that littered every surface and made the place feel homey. She had a thousand memories of hanging out there after school, having sleepovers on the weekends.

The three of them flopped onto the couch without having to say anything, a well-practiced routine. Toni pressed herself into the right side of the worn down couch, curling her legs up underneath her where she would usually prop them up on Sweet Pea’s lap while he complained, loudly and at length. She pressed her chin into the tops of her knees, almost hard enough to hurt.

Invasive, jarring flashes of memory kept blinking behind her eyes. The bar and the leapord print underwear and the heaviness of people’s stares. Around her, the universe kept spiralling out of control, over and over again.

She couldn’t reconcile the stories her grandfather had told her about solidarity, about tradition, with the grimy shame that squirmed underneath her skin. There were no visible marks, nothing like the shiny purple bruising that had disrupted Sweet Pea’s babyface for three weeks after he ran the gauntlet. And yet, it still felt like a sort of violence, something poisonous rippling all the way through her, from the center outwards.

A rerun of _The Price is Right_ was on, crackling on the shitty cable television, and Toni made a sincere effort to focus. But she shifted after a few seconds, restless. Fangs cast her a questioning glance, and she twitched again.

Sweet Pea sighed loudly, faux-aggravated. “Is there something you need?” he asked, and Toni knew him well enough to know that the question was sincere.

An idea began to bloom in her mind. “Do you have any Kool-Aid?” she asked.

Sweet Pea stood up, bare feet slapping against the tile as he walked into the kitchen. Toni listened as he banged around the cabinets, searching. “Uh- we have the fruit punch one?” he called, voice muffled.

Toni walked into the kitchen, Fangs trailing closely behind her. She grabbed the box of Kool-Aid out of Sweet Pea’s hands, examining it. “Ever dyed hair before?” she asked.

Fangs laughed. Toni pulled up instruction on the desktop computer, forcing Sweet Pea to set a pot of water to boil.

“You’re sure about this?” he asked as she dumped in the packet of powder, watching as it went cherry red.

“Yeah,” she replied, not elaborating on the fact that she caught her reflection when the t.v screen went dark and wanted to scream. She wanted something of her own, something to feel in control of again. And she had always looked good in pink.

They dyed her hair in the bathroom sink, permanently staining the white ceramic red. It was fun- Sweet Pea bitching about the dye turning his hands pink, Toni splashing him in the face with water from the faucet.

Fangs wrapped her hair up in a towel when it was done, because his mom used to do hairdressing on the side.

“Just give me a second,” she told the boys, ushering them out of the tiny bathroom. They did as instructed, and Toni leaned against the door, assessing. She pulled her hair out of the towel, admiring the new sunset shade of pink that tinged her hair.

“Toni, come on!” called Fangs on the other side of the door. “ _Law and Order_ is on.”

 _You’ll be fine,_ she told herself sternly. _You always have before._

She turned and walked back out the door.

* * *

 and you will learn/

to mind me/

and you will learn/

to survive me

\- leaning, perfume genius

**Author's Note:**

> thank u so much for reading!! I would be forever grateful if you left a comment or kudos, and come scream about fictional characters with me on tumblr @flwrpotts


End file.
